James Deetz

James Deetz (February 8, 1930 – November 25, 2000) was an American anthropologist, often known as one of the fathers of historical archaeology.

His work focused on culture change and the cultural aspects inherent in the historic and archaeological record, and was concerned primarily with the Massachusetts and Virginia colonies. James Deetz was interested in obtaining valuable information that could be used to better understand the lives of early North American colonists, natives, and African Americans. He heavily investigated a variety of material culture related to these groups to better comprehend their social behavior.

In 1997 Deetz received the J. C. Harrington Award, presented by the Society for Historical Archaeology for his life-time contributions to archaeology centered on scholarship.

Deetz received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard. Following college, Deetz enlisted in the United States Air Force. He served for four years before he was honorably discharged in 1955. In 1957 he began working on the River Basin Survey site in Missouri. This work inspired him to get his Ph.D dissertation in "An Archaeological Approach to Kinship Change in Eighteenth Century Arikara Culture." Deetz then became an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California. In his lifetime, he taught at University of California, Santa Barbara, Harvard, Brown, William and Mary, the University of Cape Town, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Virginia. While teaching at the University of California, Deetz teamed up with J. O. Brew and Harry Hornblower to excavate sites related to North American colonial archaeology. He would later meet Henry Glassie who was his inspiration to write In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life, which was published in 1977.

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